Yet here we are with the same death toll we would've had, but this time with almost 2x inflation, ridiculous shortages, and supply chain failures all around.
But hey, at least we saved a few old or obese people already knocking on deaths door...
Yet here we are with the same death toll we would've had, but this time with almost 2x inflation, ridiculous shortages, and supply chain failures all around.
But hey, at least we saved a few old or obese people already knocking on deaths door...
You can see in [4] that consumer spending patterns were changing well before lockdown orders were issued. In fact, consumer spending falls off a cliff the day the NBA suspended its season, which was also when the US stopped all flights to Europe. I don't think anyone argues that stopping travel to Covid hotzones was a bad idea, right? You can see that people starting to eat out less the first week of March, whereas lockdowns really came into full swing around the end of March.
Did lockdowns impact the economy? Sure. But you can't say the economy would be inflation-free and there would be no shortages or supply chain failures if no lockdowns were imposed.
[1] https://www.nba.com/news/coronavirus-pandemic-causes-nba-sus...
[2] https://sfmayor.org/article/san-francisco-issues-new-public-...
[3] https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/2020-03-20-...
[4] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-u-s-consumers-are-spend...
I live in Hong Kong, where we have still a somewhat silly aggressive policy. We had 213 deaths for 8M people, so around 26 deaths per million people. Our hospitals never even felt the pandemic. Nobody is suffering of doubling inflation, ridiculous shortage or supply chain failures all around, but it's true we have less obese people than the US in the first place...
If the US didn't let their people free to have so many co-morbidities, they wouldn't pay such a dear price each time a cold mutates from a lab in China. Talk about a powerful country if such a small thing coming from here can knock them down, don't you think ?